1,200 TED Attendees Experience VR Simultaneously

Chris Milk just showed 1,200 attendees at TED the power of VR – at the same time.

The stage was set at TED 2016 for Vrse founder Chris Milk to stand up in front of a packed auditorium with some of the most influential people in business and technology.

“You’re about to participate in the largest collective VR viewing in history,” said Chris Milk during his TED talk. “We are all going to watch something at the exact same time, together.”

Sitting on every chair in the theater was a Google Cardboard VR viewer and pair of headphones. The audience was instructed to download a special version of the Vrse app and ready their phones to be transported to a virtual world. And after a countdown, the experience started for all 1,200 attendees simultaneously.

This was the largest simultaneous virtual reality experience in history.

Viewers were taken through five Vrse VR experiences, “Evolution of Verse”, “Clouds over Sidra”, “Waves of Grace“, “Song for Someone”, and ending with “Walking New York.” Milk hand-selected a diverse mix of VR experiences, showing how powerful virtual reality can be as a new medium and storytelling tool.

When finished, the attendees who were all standing with a Cardboard viewer to their face, took their seat again and came back to reality. Milk finishes his talk. “I believe that everyone on Earth needs to experience what you just experienced,” he says. “That way we can collectively start to shape this not as a tech platform, but as a humanity platform.”

Milk’s message was clear – virtual reality is more than just gaming and entertainment. In fact, virtual reality can be a platform to take on unique human challenges and create lasting impact not only on the media landscape but the way we actually feel about others. And with the simultaneous VR viewing, all 1,200 attendees were in sync, feeling something together.

You too can try the VR experiences shown at TED 2016 from home by downloading the Vrse app on Android and iOS with your own VR headset. If you are not ready to strap on a cardboard device just yet, there is also an option to checkout the 360-degree video experiences on their website.